Professional Quality of Life ProQOL Educator Version
Professional Quality of Life ProQOL Educator Version overview
Creator and Context
The Professional Quality of Life Scale (ProQOL 5) measures the positive and negative effects of helping people who have experienced suffering. The educator version is the standard 30 item ProQOL 5 with the bracketed term helper replaced by teacher, which the copyright holder explicitly permits without special permission.
It was developed by Beth Hudnall Stamm, and is now stewarded by the Center for Victims of Torture. It is free to use, provided the author is credited, the content is not changed and it is not sold.
Presenting Conditions
The ProQOL produces three subscales of ten items each:
Compassion satisfaction: the pleasure derived from being able to do the work well
Burnout: exhaustion, frustration, anger and feeling ineffective
Secondary traumatic stress: work related exposure to other people's traumatic material
Administration
Self administered and self scorable in about 5 to 10 minutes. Each item is rated from Never (1) to Very Often (5), in relation to how frequently the person experienced it in the last 30 days.
Desired Audience
Anyone whose paid or voluntary work exposes them to other people's potentially traumatising material, including teachers, health professionals, social workers, emergency workers and humanitarian staff. It is explicitly not recommended for family carers.
The ProQOL measures the good and the bad together, and that is the point. Compassion satisfaction is the thing that keeps people in the work, and a service that measures only burnout will never see it. For education and health workforces under sustained strain, that balance is what makes the data usable.
Considerations
It is a screening and research tool. It does not yield a diagnosis, and it cannot diagnose PTSD.
There is no composite score. Do not build one. The copyright holder has tried and states that no defensible composite exists.
Do not administer the subscales in isolation. Compassion satisfaction moderates the other two, and the positive items reduce a negative response set.
The five reverse scored burnout items are the classic implementation bug.
The copyright holder now recommends continuous scores over cut scores, because the measure is not diagnostic.
The educator version is a permitted rewording, not a separately validated instrument. Educator specific norms should not be assumed.
How to score the Professional Quality of Life ProQOL Educator Version
Conducting the assessment
The person rates 30 items from 1 to 5 for the last 30 days. Five burnout items are reverse scored before summing.
Interpretation
Each subscale sums ten items, giving a raw range of 10 to 50. There is no total score.
The published bands, for each subscale:
22 or less is low
23 to 41 is average
42 or more is high
These correspond to the 25th and 75th percentiles of the normative sample, expressed as t scores of 43 and 57 against a mean of 50.
The copyright holder now recommends using the continuous score rather than these categories, and states that because the measure is not diagnostic, cut scores are typically not used.
Clinical Considerations
Report all three subscales together. High burnout with high compassion satisfaction is a different problem from high burnout with low compassion satisfaction.
Use continuous scores in preference to the low, average and high labels.
Verify the reverse scoring of the five burnout items in any digital implementation.
Professional Quality of Life ProQOL Educator Version use cases
Measuring compassion satisfaction, burnout and secondary traumatic stress in a workforce
Monitoring workforce wellbeing in education, health and social care
Evaluating the impact of supervision, reflective practice and workload changes
Research into professional quality of life
Category
General Well-being
Research Summary
Stamm, B. H. (2010). The Concise ProQOL Manual (2nd ed.). Pocatello, ID: ProQOL.org.
Stamm, B. H. (2009 to 2012). Professional Quality of Life: Compassion Satisfaction and Fatigue Version 5 (ProQOL).
Heritage, B., Rees, C. S., & Hegney, D. G. (2018). The ProQOL-21: A revised version of the Professional Quality of Life (ProQOL) scale based on Rasch analysis. PLOS ONE, 13(2), e0193478.
Other Assessment Guides
Professional Quality of Life (ProQOL)
Explore the Professional Quality of Life Scale (ProQOL), a validated tool measuring compassion satisfaction, burnout, and secondary traumatic stress among helping professionals. Learn about its administration, scoring, and applications in enhancing caregiver well-being. 
Big Five Personality Test FFM
Delve into the Big Five Personality Test, a key tool in assessing human personality across five dimensions: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. This article covers its application, scoring, and significance in psychology
Flourishing Scale
Discover the Flourishing Scale, a succinct 8-item measure of psychological well-being, assessing self-perceived success in life domains like relationships, purpose, and optimism. Ideal for those seeking insights into personal well-being and researchers in psychological health
Note on Assessment licensing
Some assessments are copyright protected and require a licence or the copyright holder's permission for clinical, commercial or digital use. Where that applies, obtaining and maintaining that permission is the responsibility of the practice or organisation using the assessment. Tacklit provides the digital administration, scoring and reporting. We do not grant, transfer or supply rights to the underlying instrument.
